Marx After Growth: An Introduction to Marx's Critique (Sean O'Brien, the87press)

This four part lecture series asks what the Marxian critique of political economy can tell us about the twenty-first century, a period marked by deindustrialisation, economic stagnation, growing labour superfluity and a political landscape in which the figure of the worker no longer occupies the central space it once did. The lectures will begin with an overview of Marx's method and the categories of his critique, before turning to consider theories of real abstraction, questions of geopolitical economy and the history of the capitalist class relation. Over the course of the lectures, I ask: What does the end of growth mean for the future of work? How should we think about the regularity of financial crisis? How might Marx's concept of a surplus population inform theories of racial blackness? What insights might Marx’s critique of value offer feminist theories of social reproduction? What does the decline of the workers' movement imply for an anti-capitalist politics today?
Sean O’Brien is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. His research has appeared in Cultural Critique, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies, and Bloomsbury’s Companion to Marx, and is forthcoming in Crossings. He is co-editor of ‘Demos: We Have Never Been Democratic’, a special issue of the visual culture journal Public based on work developed during the 2015 Banff Research in Culture residency. His criticism has also appeared in a number of electronic journals and literary magazines, including GUTS Magazine, The Capilano Review, Vector, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Current projects include a collaborative book, Anti-Social Reproduction, and a monograph, Precarity and the Historicity of the Present: American Culture from Boom to Crisis.
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